One type of quenching apparatuses performs quenching by spraying a cooling fluid onto a heated metallic material. For example, three-dimensional hot bending and quench equipment (hereunder, referred to as “3DQ equipment”) disclosed in International Application Publication No. WO 2006/093006 (Patent Literature 1) includes a gripping mechanism and a quenching apparatus. The gripping mechanism includes a rotatable and movable gripping portion. The gripping mechanism rotates and moves a heated metallic material while gripping the metallic material with the gripping portion, and applies a bending moment to the metallic material. The quenching apparatus includes a heating apparatus and a cooling apparatus. The heating apparatus heats a portion of the metallic material. The heating apparatus is, for example, a high-frequency heating furnace. The cooling apparatus cools the metallic material by spraying a cooling fluid.
The heated metal portion is subjected to a bending process by the gripping mechanism. The metal portion that is bent by the bending process is quenched by a cooling fluid that is sprayed from the cooling apparatus.
However, in a quenching apparatus of a type that performs quenching by spraying a cooling fluid, even if a sufficient amount of cooling fluid is sprayed, it may be difficult to make the quenching stable. Further, when performing a bending process by means of 3DQ equipment, quenching may be unstable and it may be difficult to obtain stable processing accuracy.